Telling Stories that Teach Science, or Teaching Science by Telling Stories

It may come as no surprise to some, but there is not one way of employing narratives and storytelling as tools in our science communication projects. But the more subject matters we explore through our visual communication client work at Cooked Illustrations, the more we start to see that there is a difference between Telling Stories That Teach Science and Teaching Science by Telling Stories.

To drive this idea, allow me to tell you two mini anecdotes about my personal exposure to scientific knowledge.

I started learning about the many animal species on this planet, both living and extinct, via picture books. You know the sort: amazing artist renditions of dinosaurs, high-definition photographs of insects and mammals from places so far off and different they might as well have been on a different planet to a young boy who couldn’t go farther than a couple of blocks on his own. It was the Dorling Kindersley books that I loved the most and I came to associate the brand with feelings of awe and wonder. So, when I finally discovered the television show version of those books, so titled Amazing Animals, I was already eager dive deeper. Especially once I met Henry the Lizard! Green, big-eyed, curious, and silly, this character just had the right mix of good design and relatable shenanigans that really spoke to my 6-yearl of self. Oh, and the show’s (and videogame’s) theme song? It lives rent free in my head.

More so than any of the information that either the books or the show ever shared with me.

Don’t get me wrong; both pieces of media are effective, if taken as repositories of information and facts, as encyclopaedias, as reference material that is waiting to be used. But these intellectual properties failed to contextualize the scientific information in a way that took it from curiosity into something relatable to the everyday experience of a 6-year-old me. But let’s park what that experience could be for now and let me tell you about the other way my scientific education started.

Sun-burnt anthropologists, mud-covered archaeologists, grumpy, white-bearded biologists, and the occasional sociologist often visited my home, which gave plenty of opportunities for me to learn either through explanation or osmosis. This environment of social learning did help me, at the very least, learn some amazing facts about the world. Human evolution, the history of Panama, and even the idiosyncrasies of how hunter-gatherer societies eventually stopped wandering and settled down. But this exposure didn’t fully translate into comprehension. I could say things that sounded true – facts, information – but there was something missing. To me, all this amazing scientific information was a little distant from my every day, you know. Far off in the past or other continents. And thus I grew up, knowing about hunter-gatherer societies but never quite, you know, really getting it.

That was, until I read The Flintstones comic released in 2016 by DC Comics. In Issue 8 of this satire on modernity, we see Wilma’s personal story of growing up a hunter-gatherer and the familiar relations within. We are shown how Wilma’s mother came to the conclusion that their tribe’s annual migratory routes took them through the same areas. Areas where on previous years they had dropped seeds on an empty field, and now there were many bushes heavy with fruit for them to eat. That realisation gives Wilma’s mother the idea to essentially start agriculture. Which, in time, led to a degradation of the egalitarian systems of tribal society and the manifestation of a male-dominated hierarchy. As the power dynamics of the tribe and her family change, Wilma sees no other option but to escape her childhood home, and forever straining her relationship to her mother and the concept of agriculture itself. To modernity.

And I sat there, reading this beautiful and haunting account of the rise of agriculture thinking “oh, I get it now.”

And I did.

But why did this short comic story titled The Leisure Class manage to cement my understanding about the rise of agriculture better than either the formats Henry the Lizard or dozens of anthropologists employed? How come years exposed to lectures, textbooks and teachers didn’t help me learn these ideas in a way that would’ve given them a rent-free space in my head?

In the book The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr explains that storytelling is the primordial information-sharing tool. It is how we learn everything from what is permitted in society to where to find food. Storytelling is of such relevance, that it is believe humans might have developed language in the first place to share social information. And, humans being the self-domesticated social animals with brains particularly equipped to navigate complex social environments we are, by default, attracted to a set of characteristics that come across in Wilma’s story. These are not the only elements in this story, but the ones that stood out to me in relation to Storr’s thesis.

They are:

1. Other people. Other humans. Specifically, we are interested in the events, situations and relationships that made them the person they are today.

2. What makes them who they are today is presented as a sequence of events with an anticipated (the present version of the character) but unknown resolution (what happened in the flashback)

3. The presentation is unique and novel in a way that makes it stand out in a sea of media noise, e.g. a Flintstones story talking about such emotional ideas.

I don’t think Mark Russell and Steve Pugh set out to write one of the best science communication projects about the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society, but they did set out to tell a good story. By really digging into the narrative possibilities of the subject matter (early Homo sapiens), and following the principles of storytelling, the creators of this comic accidentally made a cultural artefact that teaches about the rise of agriculture. Russel and Pugh have essentially accomplished one of the harder yet more rewarding aspects of being a science communicator, what Julia Buntaine described as explaining the unseen, the abstract, the fantastical, what was and what could be.

With this, I hope that my differentiation makes a little more sense. That there is the Telling of Stories to Teach Science, and then there is Teaching Science by Telling Stories. The difference is subtle, and if I am to spell it out, I can say that Henry the Lizard is the former, and the The Leisure Class in The Flintstones story is the latter.

And with that, I hope that we can start crafting not just better stories, but stories that really improve comprehension of complex matters rather than assuming that audiences will remember the material we are attempting to communicate just because it looks more interesting than a block of text.

- ian cooke-tapia

April 2021